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Letters home from hell: how a humble soldier's words echo around the world
Harry Lamin's letters from the trenches in World War One have attracted millions of fans on the internet – and changed the life of his grandson. Sheena Hastings reports.
Nearly a century before the arrival of the internet and the explosion of blogging, a young man, husband, father and soldier snatched moments amid the mayhem and bloodbath of Flanders Field to write simple letters to his nearest and dearest.
He let slip little about the living nightmare that was his daily routine in the trenches, only now and then mentioning the swig of rum each man consumed for courage before a foray "over the top" from which so many would not return.
He generally dealt instead in talk of food parcels, warm socks and the even the state of the weather. He craved news of his wife Ethel, young son Willie, sister Kate, a nurse in Leeds, and brother Jack, a curate in East Yorkshire.
Sometimes there were long gaps between letters, when the family must have suffered emotional torture. Then a little envelope would turn up, carried over land and sea from the 9th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment. All along the front line many thousands of squaddies like Harry were scribbling diaries, writing poetry, drawing cartoons and penning letters to friends and family many would never see again. For as long as they lasted, letters were probably a lifeline.
What would Harry Lamin, who left a Nottinghamshire lace factory to go to war, think today if he saw letters written from May 1917 onwards, when he landed in France until after the end of the war, serialised as a blog on the internet, timed to appear on the exact date that each was originally written?
Not only would he be astounded that millions of people have been reading his simple words with rapt attention over the last two years (the series is still running), but they have excited tens of thousands of comments from readers who have become deeply involved in Harry's experience of "The War to End All Wars" and fearful of how the story will end.
Bill Lamin, Harry's grandson, found the bundle of around 100 letters while clearing a drawer at his mother's house in Nottinghamshire following her death. The maths and IT teacher took them to his school, where history teachers used them as material to complement studies of World War One.
"My colleagues found them very useful in bringing the subject to life, and thought they were so interesting that they suggested I publish the letters as a book," says Bill, who's 61. "It seemed a monster job to me. Around the same time I went to a seminar on blogging and a seed was sown, I suppose. Feeding the letters one by one onto the internet in 'real time' seemed much less daunting."
It wasn't until Bill thought about how he would present the letters in context that he realised how scant his own knowledge of the Great War was. He began to investigate dates relating to the letters and fill in the gaps in his education, while providing factual background to the campaigns Harry's battalion was involved in for the blog, using materials like the battalion war diaries, available to the public at the Public Records Office in Kew.
Of the men who served in the 22 battalions of the York and Lancaster Regiment in World War 1,48,650 became casualties, of which 8,814 were killed or died after being wounded. Between them, they won 1,190 awards for gallantry, including four Victoria Crosses.
"Reading Harry's letters against the backdrop of the story of the war that was unfolding around him, you do get a cold feeling of awfulness inside you," says Bill. "You can't help but imagine him back there, up to his knees in mud with awful rations, eight-day-old bread, and the stench around him of human waste and death."
The launch of the blog quickly aroused widespread interest, and before long it was experiencing tens of thousand of hits each day. People from places as disparate as Texas, Tokyo and Tanzania began to report that they rushed to check if another letter from Harry had arrived before they brushed their teeth or had their breakfast.
And yet, as a picture of one man's war, Harry Lamin's missives are very mild and undramatic stuff. No graphic descriptions of the ravages of war, difficult relationships with the officer class or much detail of close encounters with the Hun.
Not even a lot in the way of reported banter between the ordinary soldiers stuck together in rancid, dark conditions.
While Siegfried Sassoon was writing I died in Hell - (They called it Passchendaele), and officers recorded the horrors and unspeakable suffering of that campaign, Harry Lamin could only bring himself to write to Jack: "We have had a busy time in the trenches since seventeenth of September till just now. We are out for a rest, we have earned it, we were in the trenches five Sundays out of six...
"...I think there is more military medals in our company than any other in France. No 1 and No 2 in our gun team has got one, so you see we are proud. The General said we can't all get them if we earn them, but I'm all right and don't bother about one..."... He goes on: "I was very pleased to hear you are thinking of getting married."
The attention the blog received has shocked Bill: "He was a very nice, self-contained and ordinary man. Whereas a lot of material about the war was written by the educated, privileged officer class who had better living conditions. Harry spoke from the point of view of a private and the experience was different in many ways, but his style is reticent.
"I think a lot of people have adopted Harry to represent or replace someone in their family who had been in the same war in the same trenches of France and Belgium and Italy and maybe never returned," he says. The details of how Private Lamin's war ended have yet to be posted on the blog, but he did survive and return to England.
"His wife Ethel probably burned his letters to her. The war and what it did to Harry made her very angry. He refused to go away from home forever after the war, and used to wake up screaming during his afternoon nap. I guess that although his letters betrayed so little of his feelings, the war damaged him deeply."
Bill Lamin went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst at one point, but didn't stay the course. "I only found out later that my grandmother was furious that I did it, because she so hated the Army."
Deep immersion in Harry's life has changed Bill's. "I was at Sandhurst alongside a Tongan prince, who became a friend. We later lost touch, but he found me again through the blog and I went to his coronation as King George Tupou V last year. Compiling the blog and now putting the material into a book has shown me I can write. I gave up teaching, and apart from the blog and book of Harry's letters, I've now also written a text book on World War One."
Ninety years on, the Everyman soldier has changed a grandson's life and left a wider legacy that Harry would not even have dared to imagine.
Letters from the Trenches – A Soldier of the Great War by Bill Lamin is published by Michael O'Mara, 14.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or order online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage costs 2.75.
Harry Lamin's letters continue at http://wwar1.blogspot.com
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